Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Sports Relief: Where has all the sport gone? Usually we're dripping with it, but this week the back pages of the nation's newspapers are struggling to fill their allocated space. Which is odd because it's the height of summer, the weather's perfect for sport and there's plenty of daylight. There's just no sport around. I refuse to count endless speculation about the football transfer market as sport because it's really business instead, and very boring business at that, but take transfer deals away and there's virtually nothing left. There's athletics, but that's just a lot of British non-entities trying desperately to qualify for the Olympics. There's cricket, but even a top test match fails to register in the public consciousness these days. There's cycling, but that's just a bunch of dull blokes swapping jerseys on a month-long French holiday. There's racing, but then there's always racing and it's not called the 'flat' season for nothing. There's a Grand Prix on the horizon, but that's just a lot of expensive cars in a circuitous traffic jam. How clever of the Open Golf tournament to shoehorn itself into last weekend when there was bugger all else happening. The dullness of Troon hogged all the sports headlines by default, whereas on almost any other weekend it would have been drowned by something more interesting. Can we survive this sporting drought for another couple of weeks until the double whammy of the new football season and the Olympics hit with a vengeance? I suspect so. Enjoy the peace while it lasts. And maybe spend the next fortnight reading the paper from the front for a change.
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